In 1988, the year global warming made its entrance into politics, Margaret Thatcher declared that mankind had unwittingly been carrying out a massive experiment with the planet, in which the burning of fossil fuels would produce greenhouse gases, leading to higher global temperatures. The results of this experiment remain an open question. As Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, acknowledged last month, there has been a 17-year pause in the rise of average global temperatures.

Of more immediate consequence to British families is that the UK has embarked on perhaps the most aggressive political experiment attempted in peacetime – gradually outlawing the use of fossil fuels, which we have relied on since the Industrial Revolution, as our principal source of energy. The results are already evident. Two weeks ago, Alistair Buchanan, chief executive of Ofgem, warned of rising energy bills, and questioned whether Britain would be able to keep the lights on. When there is a glut of natural gas in the US and coal prices are plunging in Europe, this country faces a green energy crunch as it attempts to decarbonise its economy.

Environmentalism has taken the Marxist concept of the alienation of the working class and applied it to the rich man’s alienation from nature. “By losing sight of our relationship with Nature… ,” the Prince of Wales wrote in 2009, “we have engendered a profoundly dangerous alienation.” In one respect, environmentalism is even more radical than Marxism. Whereas Marxism aimed to change the relations of the working class to the means of production, environmentalism is about changing the means of production themselves. Ironically, Marxism was a flop in the West, whereas environmentalism has triumphed.

One reason Britain has gone so far down the green path is that politicians have not been honest about its economic implications. During the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, which commits Britain to cutting net carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, the energy minister Phil Woolas rejected his own department’s estimate that the costs could exceed the benefits by £95 billion. The House of Commons never debated the costs and the Bill was passed, with only five MPs voting against.

The Year Without Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History By William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman 352 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99.

As the ghastly weather of 1816 persisted, observers naturally tried to divine the cause of their distress. The favored explanation among the learned was Sunspots.

When a massive volcano exploded in 1816, it plunged temperatures around the world. Mark Hertsgaard on the eerie parallels between this catastrophe and climate change in our own time.

The terms “global warming” and “climate change” never once appear in this book, but in relating the history of a literally earth-shaking event that occurred 200 years ago, the authors of The Year Without Summer - Amazon Link: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History By William K. Klingaman and Nicholas P. Klingaman 352 pages. St. Martin’s Press. $27.99. -The Year Without Summer have described a past that resembles our present in ways so uncanny, so numerous and fundamental, that the reader can only hope that Marx’s dictum—history happens twice, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce—will turn out to be wrong this time around.

The earth-shaking event in question? Not a military battle, not the overthrow of a government, the invention of a revolutionary technology, or any of the other human-centric themes that preoccupy most history books. No, this event’s protagonists were natural forces: a volcano whose eruption was the most powerful in recorded history, and the many changes that the volcano’s smoke and ash triggered on this planet.

The volcano, named Tambora and located on the island of Java in what is now Indonesia, exploded on April 5, 1816. As superheated liquid rock and gas gushed down the mountainside, an estimated 12,000 local people perished within 24 hours.

But a far greater, and distant, death toll was yet to come. As the eruption’s detritus rose into the sky, it cohered into an aerosol cloud the size of Australia. Winds then blew this cloud westward across the continents, over Asia, Europe, and the Americas.

Rachel Carson's epoch-creating Silent Spring marked the beginnings of the environmental movement in the 1960s, its 'First Wave' peaking at the 1972 Stockholm Conference. The invention of sustainable development by Barbara Ward, along with Rachel Carson the founder of the environmental movement, created an alliance of convenience between First World environmentalism and a Third World set on rapid industrialisation. The First Wave crashed in 1973 with the Yom Kippur War and decade-long energy crisis. Revived by a warming economy of the 1980s, environmentalism found a new, political champion in 1988: Margaret Thatcher. Four years later at the Rio Earth Summit, politics settled the science. One hundred and ninety-two nations agreed that mankind was causing global warming and carbon dioxide emissions should be cut. Rio launched rounds of climate change meetings and summits, with developing nations refusing to countenance any agreement restraining their greenhouse gas emissions - their blanket exemption from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol leading to its rejection by the United States that year, and again twelve years later in Copenhagen. This therefore marked not just the collapse of the climate change negotiations, but something larger - an unprecedented humiliation for the West at the hands of the rising powers of the East.

A chapter in the book, Global Warming - Impacts and Future Perspective, published in September 2012, finds that at least 63% of the global warming of the past 400 years was due to an increase in solar activity. According to the authors, "The sudden increases of solar activity that occurred after the 1724 and 1924 solar dynamo transitions have been accompanied by sudden increases of average surface temperature of 0.2ºC and 0.34ºC after 1724 and 1924, respectively. Therefore, out of the total increase in global temperature of ~ 0.8ºC during the past 400 years, less than 0.3ºC may be of non-solar origin, in agreement with previous results." The authors predict a decrease in solar activity during the 21st century will result in global cooling of 0.64ºC over the next 100 years.

“I was just a baby when we were relocated and I don’t remember much. Everybody has that black hole at the beginning of their life. That time you can’t remember. Your first step. Your first taste of table food. My real memories begin in our assigned living area in Compound 14.”

Just a generation ago, this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as “the Republic.” There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.

There are only the Authorities.

Citizens have two primary goals in the new Republic: to create clean energy and to create new human life. Those who cannot do either are of no use to society. This bleak and barren existence is all that eighteen-year-old Emmeline has ever known. She dutifully walks her energy board daily and accepts all male pairings assigned to her by the Authorities. Like most citizens, she keeps her head down and her eyes closed.

There are books that have doomed millions to death. “Das Capital” by Karl Marx kicked off the worst economic system of the modern era, claiming the lives of millions of Russians and Chinese, along with others in the process.

Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” mobilized Nazi Germany, led to World War Two in Europe, and was responsible for the deliberate killing of six million Jews and another five million Christians in its concentration camps, not counting the millions more in war dead. The Nazi leaders were ardent environmentalists.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson; a book that is credited with giving rise to the environmental movement in general and, in particular, America’s unfounded fears of pesticides, especially DDT.

Eight years would pass between its publication and the first Earth Day in 1970 that mobilized the beginning of the environmental movement by putting government muscle behind it with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

The issue of global warming continues to be a fault line in this country and across the world. There are, on the one hand, those who believe, like Al Gore, that the earth is warming to a catastrophic degree, that it is caused by man’s overuse of carbon-based energy, and if we don’t hurry and do something about it we will face the melting of glaciers and ice sheets, biblical flooding, and increased tornadoes and hurricanes. Their holy grail is the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which they cite as confirmation of their theories.

In a recent interview with Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), we discussed his recent book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, in which he documents his personal journey of discovery on this issue—from his early days in politics, as the mayor of Tulsa, to his time as a congressman—from his years in the insurance and oil businesses, and seeing firsthand the heavy hand of the federal government.

In what way is global warming a hoax? Inhofe said, “…I’m talking about MoveOn.org, George Soros, Michael Moore, the Al Gore Hollywood elites, and all that. These are people who really want to believe this, and they have unlimited funds that they pour into campaigns. They brag about having ‘defeated’ people, that they’re able to do, and that’s how they got so much political power. That is where the hoax comes in, because they’re perpetrating a hoax, and that hoax is that catastrophic global warming is taking place in the world now, and it’s due to manmade gases—CO2, carbon, methane, that type of thing—and what they want to do is just shut down this machine called America.”

Alan Jones is Australia's most popular talk back presenter. Alan Jones is a phenomenon. He is described by many as Australia's greatest orator and motivational speaker. Alan has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable to the largest Breakfast audience in Australia.

CLICK for MUST LISTEN Interview between Alan Jones and climate blogger Simon Turnill (AustralianClimateMadness.com), who exposed the ANU over alleged death threats to academics.